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Thursday, July 5, 2012

Virtual Tour of Medical Museums of the Western World! Organization for Creatives with Oliver Burkeman of "The Guardian!" This Week and Beyond at Observatory

Learn to organize with Oliver Burkeman of London's Guardian! Join Morbid Anatomy for a special Friday the 13th virtual tour of medical museums of the Western World followed by music and cocktails! Morbid Anatomy Presents this week and beyond at Observatory:

Organization and Productivity for Creative Types with Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian
Date: Thursday, July 12
Time: 8:00
Admission: $10
Produced by Morbid Anatomy

Do you hunger to climb the corporate ladder with ruthless
efficiency, leaving your rivals in the dust as you pursue your
relentless quest for wealth and power? Hopefully not, but that doesn’t
mean you can’t borrow some tactics from such people and apply them to
your own ends; to that end, this talk– by Oliver Burkeman, compulsive
to-do-list-maker and journalist for London’s Guardian–will
teach creatives, freelancers, and artists how to plan and manage
multiple projects, better plan their time, and, in general, feel less
overwhelmed by juggling a variety of projects at one time.

Burkeman has spent much of the last few years researching and
reporting on self-help culture, including the fascinating history of
the “how to succeed” publishing genre, and motivational gurus from Dale
Carnegie to Stephen Covey, and sifting the wheat from the chaff.
(There’s a lot of chaff.) Drawing on this research, this talk will
explore some fundamental principles of getting organized, managing
multiple projects, overcoming procrastination, time management, and
being both more productive and less stressed in the kinds of sprawling
artistic/creative/freelance lives that don’t get much attention in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
No cringe-inducing motivational speeches will be given; no Magic
Systems for Instant Success will be promoted. Instead, we’ll plunder
from the world of the grinning gurus the bits that actually work – so
that you’ll leave equipped with a toolkit of immediately usable ways to
do the stuff you’re already doing, and the projects you’re planning,
with greater efficiency and ease.

Please note: This event is a lecture adaptation of a recent popular Observatory class by the same name.

Since 2005, artist, independent scholar and Morbid Anatomist
Joanna Ebenstein has travelled the world seeking out--and photographing
whenever possible--the most fascinating, curious, and overlooked
medical collections and wunderkammern, backstage and front, private and
public. In the process, she has amassed not only an astounding
collection of images but also a great deal of knowledge about the
history and cultural context of these fascinating and uncanny artifacts.

This Friday the Thirteenth, please join us for a heavily illustrated
lecture based on this research, followed by a thematic afterparty. In
her lecture "﻿Anatomical Venuses, The Slashed Beauty, and Fetuses
Dancing a Jig," Ebenstein will lead you on a highly-illustrated tour of
medical museums and introduce you to many of their most curious and
enigmatic denizens, including the Anatomical Venus, the Slashed Beauty,
the allegorical fetal skeleton tableau (as seen above), the flayed
horseman of the apocalypse, and three fetuses dancing a jig. Ebenstein
will contextualize these artifacts via a discussion of the history of
medical museums and modeling, a survey of great artists of the genre,
and an examination of other death-related arts and amusements which
made up the cultural landscape at the time that these objects were
originally created, collected, and exhibited. Following, please stick
around for an afterparty featuring thematic tunes and inventive
artisanal cocktails complements of the omni-talented Friese Undine.

Joanna Ebenstein is a multi-disciplinary artist with an academic background in intellectual history. She runs the Morbid Anatomy blog and related open-to-the-public Brooklyn-based Morbid Anatomy Library. She is also the founding member of Observatory,
a Brooklyn based arts and events space devoted to the revival of the
18th century notions of the dilettante and rational amusements. Her
recent work—which includes photography, curation, installation,
blogging, museum consulting, lecturing and writing—centers on
anatomical museums and their artifacts, collectors and collecting,
curiosities and marvels, 18th and 19th Century natural history and, as
the subtitle of her blog states, “surveying the interstices of art and
medicine, death and culture.” She has lectured at a variety of popular
and academic venues, and her work has been shown and published
internationally; she is the current Coney Island Musuem artist in resident, and recent solo exhibitions include The Secret Museum and Anatomical Theatre. You can find out more at her at her website astropop.com and her blog Morbid Anatomy; you can view much of her photography work by clicking here. She can be reached at morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com.